“One of the marks of someone who has experienced significant growth in their soul is their ability to live in the midst of tension.”

-Rob Bell

I just read another great book  - this one was by Rob Bell and it’s called Sex God - Exploring  the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality. Honestly, there really wasn’t a whole lot of frank sex talk in the book (at least I didn’t think so), but how everything sexual is really something deeper (this is really about that).

 The book was all over the place (but in a good way) and really touched on some points that made me grab my highlighter QUICK!

*How you treat the creation reflects how you feel about the Creator*

This could be applied to anything - our bodies, our Earth….how we treat others. To mistreat God’s creation (even each other), it mistreates the One who created it. Makes me think differently - how about you?

You can’t connect with God if you are not at peace with who you are (the creation). Key words - you CAN’T be connected… if you are upset about your body, your life circumstances, etc. you are at odds with your Maker! And if you can’t accept your life, then you will never be able to accept others and how they were made either.

Another example of how this is really about that… Eve eating the fruit in the garden. The problem wasn’t the fruit. It was that Eve believed the promise of what the fruit would bring - something that it couldn’t.

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One thing that is universal in our world that EVERYONE experiences is pain - heartbreak….and that is something that God definitely has felt….He had given Himself to us, and had His heart broken at our rejection. He gave Himself, and left Himself open and vulnerable - waiting for a response. Have you ever felt that way?

Finally can we see our pain as not something that separates us from our Creator, but CONNECTS us to Him. Finally, we DO have something in common. If God can risk being this vulnerable, why can’t we?

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Your turn to find out if THIS is really about THAT. Take out a piece of paper. SERIOUSLY DO IT. Answer the following questions…..

What is frustrating me RIGHT NOW?

What am I angry about?

***You are going too fast. Go back…be honest. Think about what you just wrote.

What am I scared about?

What am I dreading?

What am I anxious about?

What concerns me?

What is stressing me right now, the smallest thing that I don’t want to write down because it seems so dumb but it actually is stressing me?

What am I looking forward to?

Today, tomorrow, this year?

**Do any of you want to share your list? I’ll share mine below in a comment.

Stopping…to hear God

If people are stopping to listen to you, are you stopping to listen as well? And hence forth, our speaking comes from our listening. So are the words you are speaking God’s words, or your own opinions? OUCH!

I Samuel 3:19; 4:1 - “The Lord was with Samuel as he grew up, and [the Lord] let none of his words fall to the ground…And Samuel’s words came to all Israel.”

“God protects, preserves, and empowers Samuel’s words because Samuel hears, receives, and obeys God’s word.”

My prayer is that this blog will touch someone’s life. But the words I type in these entries will mean nothing if I don’t STOP to hear God, receive from God, and obey Him by resting. Then the words will become my opinion, and I’ll take credit for it. I don’t ever want to get to that place. I want to only be a hollow vessel that just allows God to speak His words through me.

Time for Application

Okay, now it’s your turn. You don’t have to read this book now b/c I’ve summarized all the good parts (but it’s great if you do anyway). So here are things Mark gives us to apply it to our own life:

When you go to bed, ask yourself these two questions at the end of your day:

1. Where did I feel the most alive, most hopeful, most in the presence of God today?
2. Where did I feel the most dead, most despairing, and farthest from God today?

The Hard Questions

“How tied is your sense of self to your abilities? Who are you when you relinquish the title?”

Confessions from Me

Mark explains in the book that when he heard of the church thriving in his absense he was startled. He prayed for it, he rejoiced for it. Now that I am put in that place, I need to do the same. I thought I had an identity apart from my talents….

“Maybe Jacob limped after his encounter with God, not only because God wounded him, but because God pulled from him his crutches, his props, all the external things with which he supported himself. God stripped him of an identity that appeared strong to the world but that was, on the inside, flimpsy as a moth’s wings. He clothed him with an identity that looked weak to the world but was as strong as an angel’s grip.”

I’ve made a lot of changes in my life in the last few months. Many look at me and think that I am growing weaker…that I am slipping. That I am letting things go, that I am falling. But they don’t know that my identity looked strong, but inside I was WEAK. I was addicted to things that would shock every last one of them. God stripped me of this false identity and He’s making me new. Now my soul is strong, and my identity looks weak. It’s hard….it’s hard to appear weak, it’s hard to look like I don’t have the answers. It’s hard to let the guard down and come out from behind the curtain. Just like the wizard of Oz, the big booming voice is all smoke and mirrors. There is just a small man behind the curtain who is afraid, hurt, weak, broken, and without answers. But at least I know have learned how to rest, to listen, to run after Him.

Are you ready to REST?

I think the moment came for me when I reached page 153. It was like I wrote this part of the book myself….(and I quote, ha ha):

“I try to control too much. The reality is that now I meddle in too many things. And there must be something in me, some flaw, some weakness, that rises to meet the challenge in just this way.”

“I want to return to my work slow to speak, quick to listen, slow to become angry. I want to hide more things in my heart and ponder them there. I want to return with a sharper instinct to pray, to watch and wait, and with less impulsiveness to act straightaway. I want a stronger conviction that, though God welcomes my honest efforts, he manages just fine without my Peter-like outbursts of ill-conceived enthusiasm and then sudden loss or nerve, my opinion swapping and bully tactics, my reckless volunteerism to fix things for God and then desperate evacuation when things go wrong.”

“So I hold my tongue and realize how the world hums right along without my commentary on it. It manages just fine without my managing of it. It doesn’t just survive without me - could this be? - appears to do a little better, even, without my incessant tinkering.”

So I only have one more blog to summarize all the goodness I have learned throughout this book. All I have to say is, it has changed me. And the things above, even though they are truth, and they are the exact echo of my soul - it’s still not easy to live through. Trust me. My soul was sick, and is still in recovery.

How much do you want to get well?

“Nakedness (being real) and hunger are painful - like an unclosed wound. And God is relentless, always pressing on that wound.”

I couldn’t have said it better…..

Sabbath’s Golden Rule

So how do you “keep” Sabbath you may say?  So you say, “Okay, Jenny. I get it. You really didn’t need to blog 9 ENTRIES to tell me to rest. I get it - I need to rest!” Well, this book totally changed my perspective in SO MANY WAYS, I couldn’t help it. Here’s just a little bit more of what I learned from this great BOOK:

Stop doing what you ought to do. Cease from that which is necessary.

It’s the one day when the only thing you must do is to not do the things you must.

In essence, Sabbath rehearses Heaven.

YOU ARE SICK

“Restoration [or rest] doesn’t need doing. Life carries on without it. Rest is an invasion of sorts. It’s fixing something that’s BROKEN, but BROKEN so long it’s almost mended.” We’ve already gotten used to this sick lifestyle we’ve created. To rest messes with our ‘thing’ we’ve got going.

“Sickness can actually steal the place of God.”

And not everyone wants to get well.

Do you want to get well??

Sabbath and Circumcision

Sabbath and Circumcision have something in common - trust. How so? Listen to this connection that the author of this great book (The Rest of God: Restoring Your Soul by Restoring Sabbath) gives:

The purpose of circumcision in the Bible was God’s way of uniquely showing who belonged to God which is practiced on the Sabbath. Healing is also best done on Sabbath (as a sign of God’s intimate presence and blessing). So how are both like trust? To be circumcised (for those who don’t know what that is - *gulp*) is to be wounded in a place of intimacy and vulnerability. It is allowing an act of violence (a knife, a cut and a bloody removal) to occur in a place that a man hides. This same part is the part that intimately joins with a woman. So…it is choosing to be wounded at the only place where man can create life. The only place….

This is trust in that the wound and scar sets the man apart. To allow a knife to enter to such a vulnerable place certainly has to be trust

So listen to this story….

In the book of Joshua, Joshua led the Israelites across the Jordan and they camped in Jericho. All the surrounding towns hear that the armies of God are preparing for attack and they begin to fear greatly (the Amorites, Jebusites, Canaanites, and Gibeonites). At this very time God gives the command for Joshua to circumcise all the men (mostly the young men who were the fighting age).

Now think about this! All the army are going to be limping around, sore and weak from being circumcised and they are never going to be strong enough to fight a battle! If the enemy were to find this out, Israel surely would be done. Why did God give this command at this time? Why not earlier?

Because it’s all about trust…

To make a long story short, in Genesis 34, you will read that they went into the city and cut the men down like dry grass…..

So Sabbath is about trust too - it’s turning everything over to God (money, work, status, reputation, plans, projects)….anything we are tempted to hold tight to and hold on for dear life.

It’s being wounded in a terribly intimate place - our DAILY lives…our schedules…OUR time. It’s all about trust.

Are you willing to give God your schedule for a day and live in total trust that your whole world won’t come crashing down?

In Exodus the Sabbath is commanded in remembering Creation. In Deuteronomy, the Sabbath is commanded from liberation from Exodus. Exodus looks up, Deuteronomy looks back.

In Exodus, there was no choice to rest. Taskmasters made sure no one slacked off, no one sat down, you worked and you never stopped. Sabbath was created to remember you now can rest. So in the book The Rest of God: Restoring Your Soul By Restoring Sabbath, Mark Buchanan says that when you refuse to rest, it’s as though the taskmasters still hover over you, ready to beat you down at the smallest sign of you slowing down. It’s as though we have no choice, or we will be punished. Have you ever heard the ‘taskmaster’ standing over you saying the following when you slow down to take a rest?

What do you think you are doing?

You: Uh, just taking a few minutes to…sit down

You’re taking a few minutes to sit down? How quaint. How charming. You’re taking a few minutes to sit down, as though there’s not a huge, stinking pile of things that you’ve left undone. You are so weak and pathetic. I’m warning you. There are a thousand things to do. There are a million things to worry about. Get off your lazy, sprawling back-side and get busy!

When are you going to clean your office? Have you phoned the mechanic yet to have that rattle in your truck motor looked at? What about the situation with that couple at church - when are you going to attend to that? Do you know how many emails you haven’t responded to? Do you think you can just wile away an hour here on the couch when all this hangs over you? You are so smug, so rude, so slothful. What kind of time-frittering, excuse -mongering sad sack of a sluggard are you anyhow, lolling about as if the work’s all done? You should be ashamed of yourself!

Mark Buchanan says, “The lie the taskmasters want you to swallow is that you cannot rest until your work’s all done, and done better than you’re currently doing it. But the truth is, the work’s never done, and never done quite right. It’s always more than you can finish and less than you had hoped for. The rest of God is not a reward for finishing. It’s not a bonus for work well done.”

It’s a gift.

There can be no real worship without true rest.

Only God can rid us of taskmasters. Our part is to trust.

TO TRUST.

How simple, but how hard.

This idea of Sabbath or rest is really not that strange to our makeup, it’s like breathing, it’s like rain falling - just as simple as that. The book gives a great example of how crucial this type of rest is to us - “A bird flying, never nesting, is soon plummeting. Grass trampled, day after day, scalps down to the hard bone of earth. Fruit constantly inspected bruises.”

The way our bodies naturally rest is through sleep. We can try to fight it for so long, but after a while our body MAKES us stop. If we don’t, we die. Sabbath rest can be resisted, but the damage is still horrible.

In order to keep Sabbath well, we have to change our minds about God and about how we view time. Time becomes a gift and abundance, not as ration and burden. It’s only then we can appreciate it.

Psalm 4:8 says: “I will lie down and sleep in peace…for you alone, O Lord…make me to dwell in safety.”

“Every time we sleep, we place ourselves again in this position of vulnerability, or defenselessness, of dependency. And we do this well only under one of two conditions: utter exhaustion, where we can’t help ourselves, or complete confidence, where we stop trying to help ourselves.”

Ever heard the song, that contains the line ‘don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone?’ You have something, and then you don’t have it anymore - you miss it. What if you’re missing something that you desperately want to find, but you have NO IDEA how bad you are missing it?

Welcome to the jungle.

Mark Buchanan in “The Rest of God: Restoring Your Soul Through Sabbath” tells the story of his wife’s grandmother who found a rather large stone in her backyard one day. She couldn’t move it, so she figured she’d polish it and make it a centerpiece of her garden. As she polished and sanded, she noticed that gold dust was coming off the stone. She sanded and sanded and sanded feverishly, until all of a sudden it hit her….GOLD FEVER. She was going to be rich! When she stopped to rest, she noticed something was wrong with her wedding ring. The underside was thin as a wire and about to break….SHE HAD SANDED HER WEDDING RING!!!! The rock ended up being fool’s gold…the real gold dust was the remnants of her prized treasure - her wedding ring.

Mark says that we have done that in our lives. We have squandered treasures in our lives in pursuit of dust. We have eroded precious, irreplaceable things in our efforts to get something that is not even there to begin with. Think of all the times we never stopped to play with our kids, to laugh on the front porch as the sun went down, to help a friend….all because we were in a hurry. To do what? We can’t even remember.

Busyness makes us stop caring about the things we care about.

Some facets of God we glimpse only through motion, and some we discover only through stillness.

“Only those who are quiet and watchful find God’s mercy that is new every morning. Only those who join him in his love for the contrite and broken in spirit recognize him hidden among ‘the least of these’.”

Look at Psalm 23 - “He makes me to lie down in green pastures.” Mark says if we don’t choose to lie down, God sometimes makes us. This is EXACTLY what happened to me. I had so many positions at church, I was involved in EVERYTHING…..doing, doing, doing. Looking back just about six months ago, I was doing EVERYTHING and now today, I am doing NOTHING. God has made me to lie down.

Mark continues by saying that a man said to him, “I know God is trying to get my attention. I just haven’t figured out yet what he wants my attention for. He must want me to do something.” I about fell out of my bed (where I was reading this book) when I read that. HOW MANY TIMES HAVE I SAID JUST THAT?!! Mark continues by saying, “That’s the problem. You think He wants your attention in order for you to do something. Maybe he just wants your attention.”

W o w.

Another profound statement I found while reading - waiting on God is not the solution sometimes. “…wait is the wrong word. Waiting implies anticipation of something else: that this moment is not the moment.”

Isaiah 30:15-16
“In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength, but you would have none of it. You said, “No, we will flee on horses.” Therefore you will flee!”

When the weight of the world comes upon us, we try to run from it. We think that if we could, then all would be okay. Then we could finally enjoy life. But really fleeing doesn’t bring freedom. It instead brings captivity….because there will be no end to our fleeing, because there is no end of things that threaten us and weigh us down.

Learning to rest is not learning to escape. It’s not learning how to figure out the right formula to make it all seem better….so then we can quiet ourselves and rest. It’s literally a change in the way our brain operates - a total transformation of our thinking in our mind.

Look at Romans 12:2. I have to put it here in the message translation because it JUMPS out at me. You know the scripture - “be transformed by the renewing of your mind…” Well look at it in the message version:

“Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.”

Mark Buchanan says in the book that nothing really changes until our minds do. First our minds are renewed, then we are transformed, and then EVERYTHING is different, even if it stays the same. Read the last sentence again. Read it aloud until you get it. That is profound.

So let’s get back to the title - the new BAD 4-letter word….REST. Rest is a bad word in today’s culture. To rest is to go against the ‘machine’ that says more, more, more. The book talks more about this later, but rest is wrong in today’s culture! We must feel guilty for not being productive in some way, shape, or form! To rest is a waste….but Romans 12:2 says ‘don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking.’ That’s waking up every morning and going through the motions and doing things just because you are supposed to.

Stay tuned on this one, there’s SO MUCH more revelation to come!